My two hours of wonder and delight at the National Gallery’s Leonardo exhibition last week were followed the next day with a visit to the other ‘must see’ on the current cultural front, Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem at the Apollo Theatre. More than usually attuned, perhaps, to matters visual, I could hardly fail to register the huge contribution to the play’s success that is made by designer Ultz’s amazing set.

Vast trees in full leaf tower upwards beside and behind ‘Rooster’ Byron’s caravan home, the focus of the action. How on earth did they get them in?

I remember asking myself the same question last year concerning another huge outdoor set that William Dudley designed for Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, with David Suchet. This, too, was at the Apollo. Is there something special about this theatre that permits of such enormous stage furniture?

Excellent sets have been a feature of a number of productions I have seen recently. They include Miriam Buether’s double revolve that was squeezed (only just, I gather) on to the stage of Oxford Playhouse for Mike Bartlett’s Earthquakes in London, and Gideon Davies’s superb succession of school rooms — stunningly lit by Robert Carson and Peter van Praet — for Glyndebourne on Tour’s production of Handel’s Rinaldo.

Still on the subject of visuals, I must comment on the ornament to the programme for Jerusalem supplied by one of its actors. Mackenzie Crook (above), well known from The Office, is a gifted artist, as might be judged from the plant studies below. That he was thrice rejected by art schools would seem to suggest a foolish failure on their part to recognise talent.